DejaVu....A Deeper History of the United States.....

http://www.winterboy.com/dejavuintro.html

DejaVu is dedicated to the memory of Senators Paul Wellstone (D-MN), 1944-2002, and Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY), 1925-1968, who embodied American ideals and were ultimately consumed by the forces they fought hard to constrain; and to the 'Four Jersey Moms' who paid the ultimate sacrifice on 9/11 and never wavered in their search for truth- even when the Bush Gang refused them and the rest of us would have been content to ignore them.
I'd also like to express my deepest gratitude to the journalists and assorted muckrakers who did most of the hard work before I even knew there was a problem, and especially to BuzzFlash.com, who both inspired DejaVu and made it possible.

I will be following it.

:hi:

1880 Inventor-entrepreneur Solomon Dresser founds Dresser Industries during the nation's first oil boom. A patent for a cylindrical packer launches Dresser's oilfield products manufacturing business. In the next century, Dresser will be managed by Prescott Bush Sr and owned by Halliburton.

John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil now controls 80% of America’s oil refining capability.

The US Senate becomes essentially a House of industry leaders. Two Senators from each state are chosen by legislators, not by voters. Quoting one historian, the Senate consists of: “Standard Oil Senators, sugar trust Senators, iron and steel Senators and railroad Senators, men known for their business associations rather than for their states.”
This new kind of aristocracy (consisting of industrial monopolists rather than King George's courtiers) exacerbates America's imbalance of weath and power, and promotes the notion that not only should government ignore the machinations of the rich, but it should not think to interfere on behalf of the downtrodden, either. State child labor laws are labeled as improper governmental interference and overturned by the courts .

Much of the rural US is in deep economic depression by this time, giving rise to numerous populist parties and politicians, but most are poorly financed and easily quashed, and make little political headway.

1883 The US Supreme Court declares the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. It will will take nearly another century for Civil Rights legislation to become law in the US.

1886 Philadelphia-based Brown Brothers’ American Steamship has become better known as the American Line, and serves the Liverpool-New York route; it also contracts with a travel agency for immigrants in Hamburg, Germany. The Brown Brothers buy the Hamburg Carr-Line, creating the Hamburg-Amerika Line.

When Thomas Mellon retires, his two sons take over the banking firm, now called Thomas Mellon and Sons.

1898 Stock broker E.H. Harriman gains control of the Union Pacific Railroad with credit arranged by Standard Oil’s William Rockefeller. Harriman's subsequent railroad empire is due to the patronage of John D.Rockefeller- Harriman railroads transport Rockefeller oil. George H.W Bush's paternal grandfather, Samuel P. Bush, owns Buckeye Steel Castings Co; Buckeye Steel manufactures the bearings and other parts for Harriman's railroad.

George H.W Bush's namesake and maternal grandfather, George Herbert 'Bert' Walker, a native of St. Louis- but prep-schooled and University-educated in England- founds the banking and investment firm of G. H Walker and Company. Bert Walker becomes the Midwest's premier deal-maker, a big, bold and violent man, awarding the investment capital of his international-banker contacts to the railroads, utilities and other Midwestern industries of which he and his friends are executives or board members. Walker's operations are always quiet and mysterious, whether in local or global affairs. He becomes the ‘power behind the throne’ in the St. Louis Democratic Party, with sufficient influence to select the party's candidates.

George H.W Bush's paternal grandfather (and Prescott Bush’s father), Samuel P. Bush, owns Buckeye Steel Castings Co. Buckeye Steel manufactures parts for railroad magnate E.H. Harriman’s trains. Sam Bush's sons will, in the future, partner with Harriman's sons in the investment banking industry.

Morris W. Kellogg creates M.W Kellogg, a pipe fabrication business. Kellogg creates technology for petroleum refining and petrochemical processing and builds facilities based on those technologies. Kellogg is later bought by Halliburton.

In a nod to the new 'science' of Eugenics (the scientific breeding of the human race), North Dakota bans marriage for alcoholics, the insane and those suffering from tuberculosis.

Alfred Krupp, the head of Germany's largest armament firm, believes he recognizes a connection between Eugenics policies and increased labor production. He also sponsors an essay contest entitled, 'What does the Theory of Evolution Teach us in Regard to the Internal Political Development and Legislation of States?'

Guido Von Lizt incorporates the racial teachings of the mystic Helena Blavatsky into his own German mythology. He write that the imposition of Christianity on the ancient Aryan Teutonic tribes forced occult knowledge underground. Describing an ancient Germanic aristocracy, he posits a grand design for a future German state that carries on the traditions of Aryan superiority, in which only Aryans will be entitled to citizenship and strict laws will ensure racial purity. His teachings become famous throughout Germany.

1901 Andrew Mellon holds controlling interest in Gulf Oil, founded at Spindletop, TX after a major oil strike. Mellon expands his holdings in key American hydroelectric, bridge-building, public-utility, steel, shipbuilding, and insurance industries. Mellon also plays a critical role in the formation of ALCOA, the gigantic Aluminum Company of America.

When William McKinley is assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt enters the White House as President. Roosevelt declares the President of the US the "steward of the people," and holds tightly to the concept of government as an arbiter between capital and labor. In the spirit of 'justice for all, and special favors to none,' Roosevelt begins wielding the Sherman Anti-trust Act to force the dissolution of a great railroad, lumber and meatpacking trusts. President Roosevelt is soon admired by Americans, but despised as a as a 'trust buster' by industrial leaders.


1903 Yale University establishes a number of Divinity schools and hospitals throughout China that are collectively known as 'Yale in China.' Mao Zedong is said to have attended one such school. Mao becomes a disciple of Yang Changji, a nationally known advocate of combining Western science with Chinese culture, even before he discovers socialism. 'Yale in China' will have ties to US intelligence throughout WWII and beyond.

The success of Henry Ford's Quadricycle fires his automobile-manufacturing ambitions, leading him to found the Ford Motor Company.

Theodore Roosevelt denounces railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman for "cynicism and deep-seated corruption" and calls him an "undesirable citizen."

1904 President Teddy Roosevelt almost single-handedly stops the scandalous exploitation of federal lands by wealthy mining and lumber interests- who had been given free access by Republican friends in previous administrations. He uses his Presidential authority to create national parks at Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, and on other federal lands. Roosevelt is still considered by many the greatest environmental President ever.

1905 Large oil deposits are found in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Andrew Mellon will finance some of the biggest strikes of this era. Many of these oil discoveries will fuel the rise of Southern ‘new money,’ creating millionaires out of uneducated, unethical businessmen with Old South values, deep-seated racism, zealous religious orientations and strong class resentments.

1914 As war looms, William Rockefeller’s National City Bank- CitiBank- begins reorganizing the US arms industry. Percy Rockefeller takes direct control of the Remington Arms company, appointing his own man, Samuel F. Pryor, as the new Chief Executive of Remington.

During World War 1, British forces invade southern Iraq and help to push out the Ottoman Turks; by 1917, the British occupation of Baghdad is complete.

First Conference of Race Betterment is given at Battlecreek, Michigan. Many psychiatrists gather to discuss the fact that the future of the white race depends on addressing the mentally ill. A segregation and sterilization program is proposed, calling for the sterilization of 5.76 million "defective and antisocial" Americans by 1955.

1915 World War I demonstrates the scope of the world’s burgeoning need for petroleum. As the world's largest oil producer and exporter, the US supplies the oil (causing an oil market boom) on which the Allied Forces float to victory. The growing use of petroleum in modern American industrial society leads several domestic companies to secure oil concessions in Mexico.

D.W Griffith debuts his racially-inflammatory and bigoted silent film, Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman. Dixon contacts his old classmate, President Woodrow Wilson, and arranges a special showing at the White House. Wilson is said to have leapt to his feet, exclaiming, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” The movie is hailed as a technical triumph even by its harshest critics, and helps spark a change in attitude about both the KKK and American blacks.
The NAACP organizes a

W.J Simmons, a former Methodist circuit rider from Atlanta, re-establishes the Ku Klux Klan, the original Klan having died out once white supremacy was re-instated in the South. The Populist movement- which sought to unite blacks and poor whites against mill owners and the conservative elite of the South, as well as massive post-war immigration from Europe- spawns virulently anti-alien groups like the American Protective Association and helps sets the stage for the rebirth of the Klan. The movie, Birth of a Nation, and numerous books and magazine articles, romanticize and sterilize the Klan's violent history. Despite such favorable publicity, the Klan remains relatively small until 1920.

1916 In May, the AIC acquires a significant portion of stock in the United Fruit Co. By August 23, AIC announces huge profits made from the rise in value of their International Mercantile Marine and United Fruit Co stock. AIC then purchases the Brown Brothers’ Hamburg-Amerika Line.


Madison Grant, de facto head of the American 'Racialist' movement, publishes The Passing of the Great Race, concerning Nordic superiority and the decaying effect of immigration and integration. He is hailed as a cutting-edge anthropologist, and the book is reviewed favorably by Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and by periodicals as diverse as the Journal of Heredity and The Saturday Evening Post.
Like many of his contemporaries, Grant favors a Eugenics program that would promote the Nordic race and discourage the expansion of the colored races in the white world. In particular, he condemns miscegenation, or race mixing. Grant counts among his closest associates US Presidents (such as Woodrow Wilson), top industrialists, best-selling writers, and some of the greatest scientists of the time. Hitler later writes him a letter thanking him for writing this book, saying the book is his Bible.

August Thyssen, owner of Thyssen & Co, the main supplier of the German military, with 50,000 German workers and annual production of 1,000,000 tons of steel and iron, knows Germany will be defeated once the US enters the war. The 'Great War' is spinning out of control, grinding away at Germany's resources and economy. The government is broke. Thyssen's first born son, Friedrich (Fritz) Thyssen, has been groomed at the finest technical business schools in Europe and is destined to inherit his father's estimated $100,000,000 fortune and industrial empire.

Near the end of World War I, August Thyssen opens the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam. Neutral Holland was the perfect location outside of Germany to launder assets from the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin when the financial demands of the Allied forces surfaced.

1917 After President Woodrow Wilson delivers his war message to Congress, J. Edgar Hoover’s uncle gets him a draft-exempt position in the Justice Department. The US enters World War I. The War elevates Prescott Bush Sr, grandfather of George W, and his father, Samuel P. Bush, into the ranks of the Eastern Establishment- with the help of the Harriman family.

Prescott Bush's father and President of Buckeye Steel, Samuel Bush, becomes Chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms, and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board. Bush's own steel business temprarily produces gun forgings while he heads the Ordnance Section.
The senior Bush slides his government arms contracts to friend Percy Rockefeller and his Remington Arms- supplier of all the world's machine guns and Colt automatic pistols, as well as millions of rifles sent to Czarist Russia, over half the small arms ammunition used by the Anglo-American allies in World War I, and 70% of the rifles used by the US in that conflict.
US taxpayers shower unprecedented fortunes on weapons producers, patent holders, and exploiters of raw materials.
These corporations, whose dividends often paid more than 400% during the Worl War, fall into disrepute until after the launch of the German war machine in 1939.]

The press announces on August 31: "contracts for the construction of …Government-owned ship fabricating plants were awarded today…to the American International Corporation (AIC)…and the Merchants Shipbuilding Company, and orders were issued to exert every effort to rush the work."
Merchants Shipbuilding is described as "a purely private enterprise" of Averell Harriman (son of the railroad tycoon), Prescott Bush and the rest of the directors of Merchants Shipbuilding. The AIC begins building ships for the war. A small town, dubbed 'Harriman Village' (later annexed to Bristol, PA), begins to develop in the area surrounding the shipyards.

As the German economy recovers through the mid to late ‘20s, Prescott Bush and Averall Harriman sell over $50,000,000 worth of German bonds to American investors, who profit enormously from the economic boom in Germany. Prescott Bush is a director of the Union Banking Corp from 1934 through 1943.


On December 10, Attorney General Stone promotes J. Edgar Hoover to Director of the Bureau of Investigation, the title he will hold for the rest of his life.

Hoover’s FBI has no use for women, blacks, Hispanics. Of the three women serving the Bureau when Hoover takes charge, two are fired within a month and a third ends up in a mental institution, swearing to shoot Hoover when she gets out.

A majority of the nine black FBI agents who rise from the ranks during Hoover’s first 40 years act as his personal chauffeurs/attendants. Hoover always chooses to stay in hotels in Miami that carry signs which, at least until WWII, read: “No Jews; No Dogs.” Hoover says of Hispanics: “The average Mexican is a pathological liar.” Hoover also has a knee-jerk aversion to foreigners and foreign friends, is extremely xenophobic, and has only crossed the border of the US on two day-trips.

1926 Prescott Bush marries George 'Bert' Walker’s daughter Dorothy and is promoted to vice-president of W. A. Harriman & Co.

Fredrick Flick owns coal and steel industries throughout Germany and Poland and desperately wants to invest in the Thyssen empire. One of the primary motivations for a Thyssen/Flick massive steel and coal merger is to help suppress the new labor and socialist movements. Thyssen and Flick create United Steel Works (USW), the biggest industrial conglomerate in German history. Bush/Harriman's Union Banking Corp is now in the position to transfer funds back and forth for USW.

1927 Young, handsome Clyde Tolson applies for a position at the FBI. Hoover hires him directly, and within three years promotes him to Assistant Director- without Tolson having spent a day in the field- an unprecedented act of favoritism in the Bureau. Tolson remains Hoover’s loyal lieutenant and personal companion (and, it is commonly believed, homosexual lover) for the rest of Hoover’s life.

The Mellon family’s Gulf Oil is finally interested in drilling MidEast oil. Gulf geologists find the likelihood of oil along Bahrain’s 32-mile length, but never get to drill there because of the 1928 Iraqi Red-line agreement, which requires all companies involved to share area oil options equally.

George H. Walker Jr, son of George ‘Bert,’ Walker and the Bush boy’s ‘Uncle Herbie,’ (as well as the future boss of his father’s Wall Street investment firm G.H. Walker & Co) graduates from Yale, where he is a member of Skull and Bones.

John Foster Dulles becomes director of GAF Company (American I.G. Farben) until 1934.

1928 Hitler, now out of jail, is desperate for cash; his party is slipping into debt. Hitler has his eyes on the enormous Barlow Palace located in Briennerstrasse, the most aristocratic section of Munich. Hitler wants to convert the palace into the Nazi national headquarters and change its name to the Brown House. Hitler tells his private secretary Rudolf Hess to contact Thyssen. After hearing the Hess appeal, Thyssen feels it was time to give Hitler a second chance. Through the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, Thyssen says he "placed Hess in possession of the required funds" to purchase and redesign the Palace. Thyssen later says the amount was about 250,000 marks but leading Nazis later claimed that the re-molding alone cost over 800,000 marks (equivalent to $2 million today).
Whatever the cost, Hitler and Thyssen became close friends after the purchase of the Brown House.

Bush/Harriman buys and converts Dresser Industries into a public company by issuing 300,000 shares of stock. Dresser manufactures a wide range of natural gas/oil energy products and services. VP Prescott Bush Sr serves on the Dresser Board of Directors for twenty-two years; his son George H.W will work at Dresser after the war.


Prescott Bush installs friend H. Neil Mallon as president and CEO of Dresser Industries; he holds that position until his retirement in 1962. Mallon was Prescott's companion at Yale and is both a ‘Bonesman’ and George H.W Bush’s mentor. He later founds the Dallas Council on World Affairs, reputed by many to be a CIA front organization. George H.W names his son Neil Mallon Bush.

The Iraqi oil "Red Line" Agreement is signed after much debate between the oil companies involved. It rearranges the shareholding of the Iraqi Petroleum Co along more equitable lines, as follows: British- Anglo/Persian Oil Company Limited: 23.75 per cent; Dutch- Shell: 23.75 per cent; French- Compagnie Francaise des Petroles: 23.75 per cent; American- Mobil and Standard- Near East Development Corporation: 23.75 per cent; and Gulbenkian: 5 per cent.

The Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact is signed in Paris. Its signatories renounces aggressive war, and war as an instrument of national policy, but no sanctions are provided for violations.

1929 William S. Paley, rising CBS radio broadcasting tycoon, enters a 50% ownership arrangement with Paramount Studios; both companies are concerned with the future of media and the potential popularity of television. Bush/Harriman represents Paley in the merger. Averell Harriman develops a friendship with the Jewish Paley and introduces him to the social circle of ‘super-WASPS’, among them Prescott Bush and his associates.
Four months after the merger, the stock market crashes, throwing the terms of the deal into disarray.

Herman Brown’s brother George, a Colorado School of Mines graduate and ex-Marine, returns to Texas to join ranks with his brother in Brown & Root. Dan Root passes away and George becomes an official partner. Herman runs the company and George is in charge of marketing. The brothers start out paving dirt roads and building bridges for municipal and county governments.

The North American operation of the Hamburg-Amerika Line is little more than a cover for IG Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the US. The shipping line smuggles in German agents, propaganda, and money for bribing American politicians to see things Hitler's way.
In an elaborate corporate paper trail, the holding company is George 'Bert' Walker's ‘American Shipping & Commerce,’ which shares the offices at 39 Broadway with Union Banking Corp. The Bush/Harriman stock in American Shipping & Commerce is controlled by yet another holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corp, run out of George 'Bert' Walker's office. The directors of this company are Averell Harriman, George 'Bert' Walker and Prescott Bush.

Union Banking Corp is run by a Bonesman, Cornelius Lievense, who is also Director of Holland American Investment Corp. Established in 1924 as a subsidiary unit of Bush/Harriman (a joint George Herbert Walker, Thyssen, Harriman operation), the Holland Corp founding partners are George ‘Bert’ Walker, Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen.
George 'Bert' Walker appoints Prescott Bush to help him supervise the new Thyssen/Flick United Steel Works. Walker, Bush and Harriman own a third of Flick’s Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company, Poland's largest industry, and call the holding company Consolidated Silesian Steel Corp. John Foster Dulles becomes director of Consolidated Silesian Steel Company. Its sole asset is the one third interest in Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company (the remaining 2/3 of the shares are held by Fredrick Flick), which will eventually depend, as will USW, on slave labor from nearby Auschwitz.
Thyssen and Flick pay Bush/Harriman and Walker generously.

Prescott Bush's German partner, FritzThyssen, later claims that his weekends with Hitler and Hess, at his Rhineland castles, were business and not personal affairs. He also declares that he did not approve of most of Hitler's ideas, but the well-known journalist R.G Waldeck, who spent time with Thyssen at a spa in the Black Forest, remembers quite differently. Waldeck says that whenever he and Thyssen strolled through the cool Black Forest in 1929-30, Thyssen regaled him with tales of admiration for Hitler. Thyssen spoke of Hitler "with warmth" and said the Nazis were "new men" who would make Germany strong again. With the depression bleeding Europe financially, Thyssen's support made Hitler's rise to power almost inevitable.

In December, a jointly-owned, American-German Standard Oil-IG Farben research company, Standard IG Co, is established under the management of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Previously, from 1926-1929, the two companies had cooperated in developing the hydrogenation process (producing oil from coal), and experimental plants had been operating in both the US and Germany.
All research and patents held by both IG and Standard are pooled, and Standard proposes to erect new plants in the US at Bayway NJ, and Baytown TX, in addition to expansion of the earlier experimental plant at Baton Rouge.

Standard Oil announces:
"... the importance of the new contract...lay in the fact that it makes certain that the hydrogenation process would be developed commercially in this country under the guidance of American oil interests."
The majority of stock in the research company is owned by Standard Oil. The technical work, process development, and the construction of three new oil-from-coal plants in the US is handled by the Standard Oil Development Company. All aspects of the oil-from-coal program are managed by Standard Oil, with majority financing by Standard. Yet all results of this research are made available only to Germany's I.G. Farben, and are deliberately hidden from the US government (even after the start of German aggression and WWII). Standard Oil's work becomes the basis of Hitler's synthetic fuels program- which makes World War II both possible and inevitable. Nazi Germany, with little access of its own to cheap oil and rubber resources, relies on this new technology to build and maintain its war machine.

CBS’s William Paley meets again with Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman. Bush agrees to finance the CBS buyback of Paramount’s interest, reverting full control of CBS back to Paley. Bush secures a CBS directorship, as well. Paley subsequently proves ruthless and insatiable in his desire to gobble up competition and secure a media monopoly.

As the Depression deepens, America becomes obsessed with sensational crime. The flamboyant bootlegging empire of Al Capone looms larger than life. Newspapers, magazines and movies celebrate crimes and criminals. Law enforcement looks dull and ineffectual- as does President Herbert Hoover.

J. Edgar Hoover steals for himself credit that belongs to others. When Charles Lindbergh's infant son is kidnapped and murdered, Hoover is told by the head of the New Jersey State Police, Norman Schwartzkopf, Sr (father of the Desert Storm General Norman Schwartzkopf) to mind his own business.
Hoover pulls strings in Congress and the Lindbergh Law passes, giving the FBI jurisdiction in kidnapping cases. Hoover then persuades Roosevelt to give the Bureau sole jurisdiction in the Lindbergh case.

On July 2, a committee of the Prussian State Health Council advises and recommends that a law on sterilization be brought in under the title: 'Eugenics in the Service of Public Welfare.' The law is to permit the 'voluntary' sterilization of the same groups of persons (with the exception of alcoholics) as were later specified in the law of 14 July 1933.

Howard Hughes forms the Hughes Aircraft Company division of Hughes Tool. The company pioneers many innovations in aerospace technology.


After Andrew Mellon becomes US Ambassador to Great Britain, he meets with a high-ranking member of the British Foreign Office and advocates regularly, on behalf of Gulf Oil, for the Red-Line agreement to be amended.

On August 21, The Third International Congress on Eugenics is held at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The Congress proceedings are dedicated to Averell Harriman's mother, who had paid for the founding of the race-science movement in America.

In September, Thyssen invites a group of elite German industrial tycoons to his castle to meet with Hitler. They spend hours questioning Hitler, who answers all their questions to their "utmost satisfaction," Thyssen remembers. The money pours in again from industrial circles, largely because of Hitler's "monarchist attitude" towards labor and class issues.

By November, however, German voters are suspicious of Hitler's anti-democratic tendencies and turn to the Communist party, which gains the most seats in the fall election. The Nazis lose a sweeping 35 seats in the Reichstag, but since the Nazis are already secretly negotiating a power sharing alliance with Hindenberg, the outcry of German voters is politically insignificant.

1933 Final arrangements for Hitler to enter government are made at the Berlin office of Kurt von Schroder’s Bank on January 4- a meeting attended by Sullivan and Cromwell attorneys John Foster Dulles and Allen W. Dulles- future CIA Director under JFK. Kurt von Schroder, vice-president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, has just sent his grandson to New York to tour Brown Brothers Harriman offices in December.

Allen Welsh Dulles becomes director of the New York branch of the Schroeder Banking house- a post he holds until 1944.

The Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 propose federal supervision of securities traded over state boundaries, and establishes the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), empowered to enforce the regulations. Some of the abuses that the Commission will address are those that had led to the recent Stock Market crash- insider trading, bear raiding, and manipulating stocks to create the illusion of activity. One of the most alarming propositions to Wall Street players is that companies selling stocks will have to reveal their financial histories to the public.
In choosing a chairman for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Roosevelt needs a man who will strike a balance between the more radical, anti-business theorists of the New Deal, and the entrenched business interests whose support Roosevelt needs. Confiding to his advisors: “I’ll set a thief to catch a thief,” brand new President Franklin D. Roosevelt appoints Joseph P. Kennedy as the first Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
With this appointment Kennedy becomes responsible for drafting legislation which will regulate the business dealings of his former Wall Street colleagues. The Kennedy name becomes anathema to the reactionary business element like the Bushes, Walkers and Harrimans- who have a vested interest in the unregulated pursuit of greater wealth.
Kennedy is despised even more, however, by the Eastern upper class, who consider his crudeness and poor Irish past anathema to their patrician ways.]

On February 1, Hitler makes his first radio address to the German people after becoming Chancellor. Hitler declares that the members of the new government "would preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of our national life."

The German-American Bund (Deutsch-Amerikanischer Volksbund) is formed in the US by Fritz Kuhn, a chemist at the Ford Motor Company.

The Bund, which calls itself an 'American citizens' group is really a Nazi organization. It spreads propaganda claiming that the Roosevelt administration has fallen into the hands of Jews and Communists. The German-American Bund doesn’t appeal much to non-Germans, so they establish and join other pro-fascist groups; some 750 will spring up throughout the ‘30s.

The American progressive wave had peaked around 1912, and was soon buried under a deluge of World War tensions. But the ideas unleashed by it continue to forge the politics of the 20th century. Like his cousin Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt argues that the real enemies of enlightened capitalism are "the malefactors of great wealth," from whom capitalism would have to be saved by reform and regulation. Progressive government becomes an embedded tradition of Democrats- the heart of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal, honored even by Dwight D. Eisenhower. a moderate Republican who didn't want to tear down the house progressive ideas had built- only to put it under different managers.

On the night of February 27, a huge fire destroys the Reichstag, the seat of German government. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist, is arrested after he is found bare to the waist inside the Reichstag. During interrogation, the young radical confesses that he set the fire "as a protest," but denies any connection with the Communist Party and swears he alone had set the fires inside the Reichstag. Rudolf Diels, chief of the Prussian political police, tells Hitler that van der Lubbe's confession rings true, but Hitler refuses to believe the arsonist had acted alone and blames the Communist movement as a whole for the troubles that continue to plague Germany. Hitler and Goebbels work from midnight to dawn at the "Völkischer Beobachter" offices preparing the next day's edition, which accuses the Reds of a plot to seize power and setting fire to the Reichstag.

In response to the devastating Reichstag fire, Hindenburg signs the ‘Decree for the Protection of the People and the State,’ which has been quickly drafted by Hitler and his aides. This emergency decree suspends all the civil liberties granted by the Weimar Constitution. Free speech, free press, sanctity of the home, security of mail and telephone, freedom to assemble or form organizations and the inviolability of private property are all abolished. The Decree also allows the Nazis to put their political opponents in prison and establish concentration camps.

Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak had helped Franklin Roosevelt gain the majority of voters in Chicago during the 1932 Presidential election. On February 15, Cermak appears with President Roosevelt at Belmont Park in Miami. An Italian immigrant and alleged anarchist, Guiseppe Zangara, fires five shots at Roosevelt. They all miss the President but one hits Cermak in the stomach. On the way to the hospital Cermak tells Roosevelt, "I'm glad it was me and not you, Mr. President."
Anton Cermak dies three weeks later on March 8. Guiseppe Zangara claims in court he was trying to kill Roosevelt, but J. Edgar Hoover mouthpiece Walter Winchell spreads the story that Cermak was the real target. An FBI investigation concludes that Zangara is a 'mentally deranged loner' and is not involved in any conspiracy.

Hitler tells a large audience in Frankfurt that he "will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. I won't have to worry about justice, my mission is only to destroy and exterminate."

Prior to the Nazi seizure of power this year, worker protests had spread all across Germany in response to the Great Depression. During his drive to power, Hitler exploited this social unrest by promising workers he’ll strengthen their labor unions and increase their standard of living. But these are empty promises; privately, he is reassuring wealthy German businessmen that he will crack down on labor once he achieves power.
Hitler shows his true colors by promptly breaking all his promises to workers. The Nazis abolish trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike. An organization called the 'Labor Front' replaces the old trade unions, but it is an instrument of the Nazi party and doesn’t represent workers. According to the law that created it, "Its task is to see that every individual should be able… to perform the maximum of work." Workers indeed greatly boost their productivity under Nazi rule, but they are also exploited. Between 1932 and 1936, workers wages fall over 20%, yet workers do not protest. This is partly because the Nazis have restored order to the economy, but an even bigger reason is that the Nazis crack down on any protest.

Before WWI, the Hamburg-Amerika Line was the largest merchant fleet in the world, with at least 175 ships, all of which were seized during the first War. By 1932 Hamburg-Amerika owns 118 oceangoing ships, and North German Lloyd shipping line has also regained its former status. Under official Nazi supervision, the Hamburg-Amerika Line (Hapag) and North German Lloyd Company approve a merger in a joint board; the German Reich becomes majority shareholder of both shipping lines.
Prescott Bush's ‘American Ship and Commerce Corp’ installs Christian J. Beck, a long-time Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines Hapag-Lloyd on 4 November.

Hitler appoints Joseph Goebbels Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. He quickly begins ‘coordinating’ all aspects of cultural life, the press and communications under the control of the Nazi Party. Day after day, Goebbels drills home the messages of blood, race, and glory, all cleverly designed to appeal to the broadest segment of the German masses. Anti-Semitism is one of his most useful tools and fueling it one of his highest priorities.

As the Depression deepens through the ‘30s, rampant anti-Semitism increases, driven by the Ku Klux Klan and the 750 plus pro-Nazi/fascist grass roots organizations springing up all over America.
William Dudley Pelly, the son of a Methodist minister who believes that Jews are the children of Satan, founds the ‘Silver Shirts’ on January 31, in Asheville, NC (the day Hitler takes power in Germany). He describes the group as a ‘Christian militia.’ Throughout the ‘30s, the Silver Shirts become one of the largest and most violent of the pro-Nazi/fascist groups and are most popular in areas of the country where the Klan is well established.
In the Pacific Northwest they assume dominance among groups after the Klan splits apart in Oregon and Washington. The Silver Shirts are openly pro-Hitler and form alliances with the American Bund and the Klan.
Many of today's far right groups can trace their ancestry directly to the Silver Shirts. The Posse Comitatus’ founder Henry Lamont Beach was a leader of the Silver Shirts in Oregon. Likewise, Richard Butler, the founder of the Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, ID was also a Silver Shirter (as well as former Klansmen).
Gerald L. K. Smith, one of the founders of today’s Christian Identity religion- common to the Posse, the Aryan nations and many of the militias and Klan groups- is perhaps the most influential former Silver Shirt member. It is the intolerance and blinding racism of religious fundamentalists that binds the fascists groups of the 1930s to today's right-wing extremists groups.


The May 20 New York Times reports that upon Hitler reaching power, an agreement to coordinate all trade between Germany & America is reached after negotiations in Berlin between Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles. As a result, the Harriman International Co, managed by Averell 's first cousin Oliver Harriman, forms a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals to conduct all exports from Germany to America.

Max Warburg's son, Erich, sends a cable to his cousin, Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system, asking him to "use all your influence" to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including "atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc."

In one of the oil industry's more daring capital ventures, Socal (Standard Oil of California, later Unocal) obtains an exclusive sixty-year concession in the new desert Kingdom of Saudi Arabia- the only principality in the area not under British control. Three years later, the need for additional capital and market outlets persuades Socal to take in Texaco as a partner in its new venture. The revenues from the first Arabian oil exports in 1939 so impress King Ibn Saud that he increases the acreage of the American concession to 444,000 square miles, giving the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company a monopoly over a piece of real estate the size of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico combined.

A wave of crime sweeps over the American Mid-West. Names like John Dillinger,’Machine Gun’ Kelly, ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, ‘Baby Face’ Nelson and ‘Ma’ Barker capture the imaginations of millions of Americans. The media romanticizes criminals into popular Robin Hood-esque characters. When some of these criminals rob banks they also destroy mortgage and loan records, thereby rationalizing their crimes by helping out the 'little guys,' who face the loss of everything they have.

FDR picks Homer Cummings as Attorney-General. Cummings creates the new ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation’ by merging Hoover’s BI, the Prohibition Bureau, and Bureau of Identification; Director J. Edgar Hoover now has 266 agents and 66 accountants. In the next decade, Hoover will pick high-profile cases and arrange for himself to be photographed making arrests or even shooting it out with gangsters, until he is considered America’s Number One Hero and a national celebrity. He begins to see himself as the guardian of the country's laws, citizens and morals.

A US Senate arms-traffic committee investigates Samuel Pryor and Remington Arms, which they determine is a member of an explosives cartel that includes Germany's IG Farben; the Committee further finds that nearly all the Nazis and other German political groups are armed with American guns, shipped from America on the Bush-Harriman Hamburg-Amerika Line (now Hapag-Lloyd) to the Antwerp harbor, then moved by river barges through Holland without police interference.


Max Warburg is selected by Prescott Bush to be the American Ship & Commerce Line's official representative on the board of the Hamburg-Amerika Line- now Hapag-Lloyd. Warburg is a long time advisor of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s Economic Minister and an executive in the Reichsbank. Warburg is also a close friend with Bush family friend Montagu Collet Norman

Prescott Bush's personal friend William S. Farish is appointed chairman of Standard Oil by John D. Rockefeller. Farish is also close to Hermann Schmitz, chairman of IG Farben. Farish hires publicist Ivy Lee to write pro-IG Farben/pro-Nazi propaganda and insinuate it into the US press. He employs Nazi German crews for Standard Oil tankers, and hires the chairman of the Hamburg-Amerika Line to chair the Standard Oil Company German subsidiary. Karl Lindemann, board member of Hamburg-Amerika, becomes a top-level Farish-Standard manager in Germany. Both Emil Helfferich and Karl Lindemann are authorized to write checks to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi SS, on a special Standard Oil account. This account is managed by Kurt von Schroeder. According to US intelligence documents reveal, post-war, that Helfferich continued his payments to the SS into 1944, when the SS was supervising the mass murder at the Standard-IG Farben Auschwitz and other death camps. Helfferich told Allied interrogators after the war that these were not his personal contributions-they were corporate Standard Oil funds.

1934 On 1 January, Hitler writes a note of thanks to Ernst Roehm, leader of the National Socialists’ revolutionary army- the SA (also known as the Brown Shirts):
"I thank you my dearest Ernst Roehm, for the services which you have given to the National Socialist Movement and the German people, and to assure you how very grateful I am that I am able to call such men as you my friends and fellow fighters."
The SA numbers about two million- twenty times more than the real army. The SA are mostly working class and unemployed. They are zealouly Socialist (young German students favor the Communist Party, soon to be abolished by Hitler).
The SA, having helped Hitler gain power, now pose several real dangers for him:
1. Roehm and many other SA men want a second, and Socialist, revolution- as promised.
2. The rowdy, violent, thuggish SA is unpopular with businessmen and Hitler's financial backers.
3. The SA is despised by the German army, who see it as an unqualified but dangerous rival, and Hitler needs the army's support if he is to take over as President when Hindenburg dies.

Pro-Nazi/fascist groups begin spreading the rumor that Franklin Delanor Roosevelt is in reality a Jew named Rosenfeld.

On the opening day of the 73d Congress, Samuel Dickstein introduces a resolution calling for the formation of a special committee to probe into fascist and pro-Nazi activities in the US. The 'Dickstein Resolution' (H.R. #198) is passed in March, with Samuel Dickstein Vice-Chairman (Dickstein had refused the chairmanship of the Committee, feeling that his Jewish ancestry might have an adverse effect on the proceedings.)
Throughout the rest of the year, the newly-named Special Committee on Un-American Activities conducts hearings, bringing before it most of the major figures in the US fascist movement. Dickstein, who proclaims as his aim the eradication of all traces of Nazism in the US, personally questions each witness. His flair for dramatics and sensationalism, along with his sometimes exaggerated claims, continually capture headlines across the nation and win him much public recognition.

When several FBI agents are killed in a gangster escape attempt, Congress passes nine major crime bills that give Hoover much more authority and money to go after criminals. Hoover starts to add special agents who are not only investigators with law and accounting degrees, but are also comfortable making arrests and chasing after criminals, pistol in hand.
J. Edgar Hoover has always been very jealous of publicity showered on others, however, just as he’s angered by the glorification of gangsters in the press. The Bureau makes several high-profile captures, but it takes Special Agent Melvin Purvis tracking down and killing the escaped John Dillinger to really put the Bureau in the limelight. The press portrays Purvis as national hero, and Hoover deeply resents it.
To Hoover's further annoyance, Purvis then tracks down Pretty Boy Floyd and kills him, too. Hoover makes sure he himself is in the pictures this time, but Purvis is now on the wrong side of Hoover for “hogging all the glory.”
Purvis doesn’t get the message, or openly defies Hoover, and next sets his sights on Baby Face Nelson.
Hoover harasses Purvis until he resigns from the FBI. Hoover doesn't stop there, however, but continues to interfere in his career, behind the scenes, until Purvis commits suicide in 1960 with the same gun he used to shoot Dillinger. Purvis' widow thanks Hoover for not attending the funeral.

In March, Hitler announces his plans for a vast new highway system, connecting the entire Reich with an unprecedented wide road design- especially around major ports. Hitler wants to bring down unemployment but, more importantly, needs the new roads for speedy military maneuvers.
Against treaty provisions, Hitler orders a 'rebirth of the German army' and contracts with Thyssen and United Steel Works for the overhaul.
Thyssen/Flick's profits soar into the hundreds of millions, and the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart and Bush-Harrimans Union Banking Company in NYC are soon awash with new cash.

On March 19, the New York Times reports that the Polish government is applying to assume control over Bush-Harriman's holding company, Consolidated Silesian Steel Co, and its one third ownership of Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company, because of rampant "mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities." The Polish government requires the company, which accounts for over 45% of Poland's steel production, to pay at least its full share of back taxes. Bush-Harriman hire John Foster Dulles to help cover up improprieties. The case will drag on until Hitler invades Poland.

According to documents recovered by the Allies after WWII, Hitler and Dr. Joseph Goebbels want to 'Germanize' America in order to eliminate it as a military threat. Goebbels writes: "Nothing will be easier than to produce a bloody revolution in North America. No other country has so many social and racial tensions. We shall be able to play on many strings there."
“Undermining morale, warping public opinion. It is a secret war directed against the mind and spirit of the people,” writes Germany’s ‘strategist of terror,’ Dr. Ewald Banse; he continues: "The enemy nations’ originally solid, powerful and well-knit fabric must be gradually disintegrated, broken down, rotted, so that it falls apart like a fungus treaded upon in a forest."
Weapons of the Axis psychological saboteurs include: disruptive propaganda; malicious rumors and lies; artificially created opposition movements; deliberate exploitation of genuine opposition movements, bribery, corruption and intimidation.


In the US the psychological saboteurs have five major objectives: use race hatred to disrupt the American people; undermine confidence in the government, especially the Roosevelt Administration; isolate and prevent US from joining any anti-Axis alliance; keep the US (especially the Navy) unprepared for the Second World War; build an American fascist party as a fifth column ally to the Axis.

Hitler orders the entire SA to take a month's leave in July. A meeting of SA leaders is set for 30 June at a village inn near Munich. Hitler promises to attend.
The next morning all the SA leaders at the inn, and in Berlin, are arrested and executed, most on the spot. Roehm himself is shot in his prison cell after he refuses to commit suicide. Hitler later says he is sorry that he had to destroy Roehm.
Hitler officially claims seventy-seven dead, but the actual number is likely much higher. Less than half the dead are SA members; many private quarrels were also settled that night- which is named Night of Long Knives."
President Hindenburg sends Hitler a telegram: "I see that through your determined intervention and bravely risking your own person, you have nipped all plots in the bud. I express to you my deepest thanks.”
One month later, Hindenberg is dead; the next day, Hitler rules Germany.

Radio personality Walter Winchell, a lifetime personal friend and one of the FBI's biggest promoters, introduces Hoover and Clyde to the Stork Club in NYC, the ‘place to be seen’- further enhancing Hoover’s celebrity status- where he will occasionally rub shoulders with mobsters, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Grace Kelly, the Chinese anti-communists Chiang Kai-sheks, and others. J. Edgar’s food and drink are always paid for by the club.

After the Nazis take power, they quickly establish a tightly controlled war economy. Like many war economies, this one booms, making Germany the second nation to recover fully from the Great Depression (the first is Sweden...following Keynesian-like policies, the Swedish government spends its way out of the Depression, demonstrating that state economic policies can be successful without resorting to dictatorship or war).

The Southern Baptist minister M. E.Dodd, of Louisiana, makes headlines by attending the 1934 Baptist World Convention in Berlin. Dodd is a racist even more extreme than Smith or Coughlin and praises the Nazis. Dodd justifies Hitler's gestapo tactics against the Jews by linking Jews with Communism. He considers the Jews in Germany to be outside agitators similar to the racial agitators in the US South. Some Southern Baptists do denounce the Nazis, but the Alabama Baptists follow Dodd's views.

1935 When alleged Baby Lindbergh kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann is finally captured, it’s not due to any scientific investigation on the part of the Bureau (to this day, many researchers believe Hauptmann was simply scapegoated because of anti-German sentiment, or to cover up Lindbergh’s own role in the baby’s death).
When the New York City Police Commissioner announces the arrest of Bruno Hauptmann, Hoover rushes to New York for the photo-op. While the Bureau has done almost nothing on the case, Americans are led to believe that master detective J. Edgar Hoover triumphs once again.

America has, by now, achieved some measure of recovery from the Great Depression, but businessmen and bankers are turning increasingly and more intensely hostile towards Roosevelt's New Deal program. They fear his economic experiments, are appalled because he takes the Nation off the gold standard and allows deficits in the budget, and dislike the many concessions to organized Labor. Roosevelt responds with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthiest, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.

Hoover helps Warner Bros produce the film G-Men, with Jimmy Cagney. Many more such movies follow, and J. Edgar becomes a media darling, Public Hero Number One. New censorship laws allow gangsters on the screen only if they are being captured or killed by FBI men. The public sees the Bureau as a self-contained agency, not as answerable to the Justice Department.

By the time the Dicksteins's Special Committee on Un-American Activities report is issued in February, its conclusions are known to most Americans: the Committee finds that while Nazi Germany is indeed giving both financial and ideological support to the Friends of the New Germany (the American Bund), the American Bundists are not in violation of any existing federal law. In reaction, Germany officially denies any affiliation with the American Bund and prohibits all German nationals from joining the Bund.

The German American Settlement League buys the Long Island property of recently deceased, 100% flag waving American Jim Coombes. The new owners of the property, all of German ancestry, are initially assumed to be loyal Americans of the sort Jim Coombes would approve.
Ernst Mueller, head of the German American Settlement League, prepares a letter that is sent to members of the League, the German-American Bund and other organizations of German Americans, inviting all to visit this beautiful lakeside property, now named Camp Siegfried. The members of these various societies are post-WW I immigrants living in the New York City area.

The Governor of Oregon announces that he will not pardon any convicted sex criminals unless they are sexually sterilized (castrated). He also declares that, following the lead of Nazi Germany, he will expand the state’s sterilization law to include all “moral degenerates and sexual perverts (as well as the retarded),” whether they have committed a crime or not.

Andrew Mellon’s income-tax return for the year of 1931 becomes the subject of a federal fraud/tax evasion investigation; he’ll be exonerated in December, 1937, four months after he dies.

John Foster Dulles writes a long article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled 'The Road to Peace.' He excuses Germany’s secret rearmament as a justifiable action, the Germans taking back their freedom. Knowing what we now know about his relationships with Germany’s munitions industry, Dulles is obviously attempting to mislead the American public

1936 FDR is re-elected by a top-heavy margin. Feeling he is armed with a popular mandate, he seeks legislation to enlarge the Supreme Court, which has been invalidating key New Deal measures. Roosevelt loses the Supreme Court battle, but a revolution in constitutional law takes place and the US government wins the legal right to regulate the economy.

In August, FDR calls for a private meeting with Hoover to discuss what Hoover later describes as "subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism." No notes remain from that meeting, but Hoover reports that FDR wants him to discreetly provide him with a "broad picture" of both movements.
Hoover interprets this presidential request as permission to resume domestic surveillance activities.

A young law student named Richard Milhous Nixon, close to graduation, goes job hunting in NYC. William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the founding attorney of Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Irvine, is a leading Republican who will later run the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) during WWII, and who prefers to recruit bankers, businessmen and lawyers for intelligence work. Donovan meets with Nixon personally, likes very much what he sees, and requests Nixon return for a second interview.
According to Nixon, he declines the opportunity to join Donovan's firm.
Nixon’s highest hope on this NY trip is to secure a position at Smith and Cromwell; the Dulles brothers are part of the panel that interviews Nixon.

Billionaire Howard Hughes builds the Texas Theater, a movie house in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald will be arrested there in 1963. It’s all but certain that the Texas Theater becomes a clandestine meeting place for underworld elements, FBI agents- who often frequent Jack Ruby’s strip club, Dallas cops, and even local CIA assets. Dallas is rife with all these characters, and other Hughes properties are put to similar use.

While future right-wing publisher Henry Regnery is in Germany studying and dabbling in fascism and Eugenics, Hitler invades the Rhineland and the Sudetenland. He accelerates his persecution of non-Aryans in Germany.

Fritz Kuhn, head of the German-American Bund, visits Hitler in Germany. Upon his return to Long Island, the weekend meetings at Camp Siegfried begin to repeat the anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and anti-Labor Union tirades of Nazi Germany.
The German American Settlement League initiates a boycott of Jewish merchants in NY; all German-Americans are encouraged to patronize merchants displaying the DKV sign (indicating that merchant is a member of the pro-German merchants). The Jewish community responds with a boycott of German operated shops, although some of the vendors supplying the Camp Siegfried restaurant are Jewish and continue to provide services.

Palestine’s Arab population revolts against the flood of Jewish immigration, but there is no suppression by the British forces until 1939. 385,000 Jews and 980,000 Arabs now live in Palestine; the Jewish population ratio has nearly quadrupled, from 11% to almost 40%, in just over a decade.
Great Britain suggests that Palestine should be divided into a Jewish and an Arab state.